Day After DACA Repeal, Immigrants Take Down Statue of Jeff Sessions Outside the DOJ

September 6th, 2017

After yesterday’s announcement that the White House is terminating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, groups rallied in front of the Department of Justice to condemn Attorney General Jeff Sessions for his role in ending DACA and promoting hyper discriminatory, anti-immigrant, and pro-prison practices.

Members of the immigrant community spoke out against the racist attack on undocumented DREAMers, including Genoveva Ramirez, an Illinois grandmother ordered to be deported next month. Ramirez emphasized that Sessions should have no place in the Department of Justice, white supremacists should have no place in the White House, and the urgency of rising up against attacks on our communities. The rally set a tone of fierce resolve, with high-energy chants and calls for continued resistance.

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is named after Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy and P. G. T. Beauregard, the Confederate Army’s first General who started the Civil War. True to his name, Sessions was determined to be ‘too racist’ to be a federal judge in 1986 and is now pushing the Department of Justice to take a more active and heavy-handed role in driving deportations as the U.S. Attorney General under Trump. Revoking DACA is the latest of his aggressively racist and discriminatory moves as Attorney General including:

During a time when our news feeds are overwhelmed by a never-ending stream of crises, it helps to remind ourselves that there are specific individuals who are responsible for systems escalating the violence we are seeing across the U.S. and, as the old saying goes, they have names and addresses. Today’s demonstration did exactly that by naming Jeff Sessions as the racist monument that he is and insisting we take him down.

Check out more highlights and the full livestream of the rally below.

Every dictator eventually falls. We'll take down Sessions, Trump, and every living monument to white supremacy in this administration.#DefendDaca #ConfederateDOJ #DefyDefendExpand